Fashionistas (1789)

Found - a scrapbook of press-cuttings mostly from the Irish newspaper the Cork Gazette. This cutting dates from about 1789. They are mostly taken up with oddities, strange wagers (can a walking man cover 20 miles faster than a walking horse?*) horrible executions, feats, obituaries, a letter from Dean Swift, marriages of royals etc., This piece about current extreme fashions is an example of the  slightly sensational journalism of the time…

Fashion

This most whimsical of all human inventions has undergone, within these few years the most unaccountable changes imaginable, nor is she yet at rest but, with Protean wantonness, every day affirms the new form, leaving a gaping world in pursuit of her. One no sooner catches her, than she escapes, then presents herself under a different form, still more seducing and irresistible than the former.

One time she lets her head grow to the length of a cows tail, then cocks it - it sometimes flows loosely, and others nicely plaited and made into tresses - she soon prides in frizzing, and after that falls down by the ears, hanging like a pound of candles - her  present frolic is a crop, which for aught we know be soon metamorphosed into a shorn head. 

This Dame puts her hat  into a thousand  forms

Son of the Sixties

Found - in Axle, a short lived magazine, from June 1963 this amusing and intriguing portrait of a sixties type (or archetype.) It was written  by Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley the editors of the magazine. These 2 men, 23 at the time, went on to become successful pop music composers - hits included Dave Dee's Xanadu..In 1970 they even wrote a song for Elvis ('I've lost you'.)The reference to 'Dexadrin' is obscure- can find no trace of such a magazine, possibly ingested rather than read...

Son of the Sixties

Build: Tall; slim; muscular without exercise. Complexion: clear; permanently bronzed without sun or Man-tan; never sweats...Seldom laughs (but rare smiles are planned and dazzling - he was born in natural fluoride area). Hair: Black; well-combed, no dressing; styling suggests but never quite descends to more obvious fashions of the day (Frost, Como, etc.) Clothes: by John Michael and Marks and Spencer. Can wear white shirt for whole week. General appearance: Air of masculine competence cunningly offset by one or two ambiguous touches (name-bracelet, St. Christopher chain, pastel denim shirt); usual expression, mixture of Come-Hither and Come-Off-It; can appear alternately boyish and authoritative, a trump combination

A Post-Punk Manifesto (1993)

Found in a now unfindable short-lived magazine Verbal Abuse from 1993 - a post punk manifesto by 'editrix' Chi Chi Valenti in a special Punk issue 'No/ The Future.' Coming out of New York's early 90s underground demi-monde (especially the legendary club Jackie 60) the magazine was, in this issue, boldly keeping the punk flag flying 15 years after its demise. It was a time of  AIDS and cyberpunk, just pre internet… Vogue was championing punk fashion for that fall. Contributors included Richard Hell, Matthew Barney, Patti Smith, Charles Henri Ford, Chris Stein, Alan Vega etc., We like a good manifesto and this is a curiosity- a manifesto after the event, proclaiming former glories possibly with a view to re-igniting the dying embers. But some say punk never died..



Punk made good on its only promise -DESTROY- by self-destructing while still in its infancy, thus guaranteeing eternal life.

Punks morals were spray-painted like prophecies on Paris walls by the rioting student of 1968 : 'NEVER WORK' 'BE CRUEL' 'IT IS FORBIDDEN TO FORBID.'

Punk made black-and-white beautiful in the post technicolor world.

Punk's name was already 'in the air' in 1975 when Legs McNeil and John Holmstrom founded their new magazine and a generation found its B-movie moniker.

Punk spit on its idols, who often spit back.

Punk was speeded-up Dada for the information age. Cyberpunk is faster by a thousandfoldfold: Duchamp's bride on overdrive with all of punks adolescent rage intact.

Punks  printing press was the Xerox machine. Tens of thousands of handbills, broadsheets and fanzines were distributed during Punk's golden age, most of them free.

Punk introduced the dominatrix as shopgirl (Jordan), as dream girl (Sue Catwoman) and as career girl (Anya Phillips). Now she's the girl next door.

Punk's most famous phrase was no future years before AIDS would prove it true.

Punk artists brought the old Situationist device of détournement (the theft of fine art and advertising images and their co-opting for propaganda purposes) to the masses. Jamie Reid's safety-pinned Queen Elizabeth is the détourned poster girl of punk.

Punk made the terrible child sacrosanct  and the martyred junkie a saint.

Punk was the final solution to the visual mistakes of feminism, driving a generation of girls to the bleach. Some have never returned.

Punk's call to arms was drafted by the newly formed Situationist International (S.I.) in 1957, the year Sid Vicious was born. It began 'first of all we think the world must be changed.'

Punk rocks again this winter if one is to believe the September issue of Vogue, whose writer hastens to assure her readers: "But don't expect any death-to-the-establishment messages this time."

Punk made fools of its merchandisers once, and stands poised to do so again. 

Viva La Punk!

Chi Chi Valenti, Fall 1993

Coloured pyjamas in Alassio

From Gone Abroad (London 1925) by the somewhat forgotten travel writer Douglas Goldring. The chapter 'In Liguria' has much on the beach resort of Alassio at the time much favoured by the English. However according to Goldring they tended to leave at the beginning of June when the heat was becoming too much, to be replaced by native Italian tourists. Goldrings notes on fashion are interesting, portraying a lost world of men and women walking around the town in coloured pyjamas and screaming Italian bathers with exotic swan shaped rubber rings:

Then follow the two months of its "grand season," when prices are nearly doubled and the town makes more money than during the whole half-year of the English occupation. On July 1st, from Milano and Torino, comes the first train-load of holiday-makers, and from then onwards till the end of August the town is gradually packed to suffocation with Italian business people and their wives and families. The transformation is amazing. As if by magic the sands become covered with bathing-tents and thronged with bathers, from Santa Croce almost to Laigueglia. The sea is studded with little white-sailed yachts, canoes and motor-boats. Inside the town, caffés one had scarcely noted during the winter blossom out with bands and concerts and are filled with visitors eating gelati, spumoni and cassate, or drinking their "caffea espresso." The narrow Via Umberto Primo—nicknamed by the English "'the main drain "—swarms with young men in brilliantly coloured pyjamas. The shops are freshly stocked, and many of them display fantastically shaped bathing bladders of red india-rubber, some in the form of fishes, others fashioned like swans. And everywhere one sees pyjamas—purple pyjamas, blue pyjamas, pink pyjamas, striped pyjamas. So attached are the Italians to this form of costume that, despite the entreaties of the hotel-keepers, they often wear their pyjamas at dinner, and even dance in them afterwards. . . 

  To the traveller familiar with a French or English plage the bathing at Alassio, from the spectacular point of view, is depressing. Anyone expecting to find dark-eyed houris tripping

Buying a pair of jeans in 1829

Cotton cords, Drills, Fustians, Jeans etc.,

This classified ad from the Chelmsford Chronicle of 17 April 1829 shows that you could buy a pair of jeans from the Regency equivalent of Primark at 88, Whitechapel High Street, just 'thirteen doors down from Brick Lane'.

Chances are, your new jeans wouldn’t have been made in a sweat shop in the far east, but would have arrived at the London Docks ( just down the road from Whitechapel) on a boat from Genoa, the word jeans being derived from ‘Genes’,  the French word for the Italian seaport.*

Nor would your 1829 strides have been made of denim, which was made into pants (trousers) for Californian gold miners by Levi Strauss around 1854--ironically, Strauss was born on 26 February 1829, a couple of months before this ad appeared. The OED maintains that the 1829 cloth was originally known as 'jean fustian', which was abbreviated to jeans. It’s likely that back then your average Regency buck-- Corinthian Bob or whoever-- wouldn’t have been seen dead in a pair of jeans (or in Whitechapel High Street, for that matter) and would have associated them more with sailors from Wapping or Shadwell dock workers.

*The word 'denim' is also of French origin. It comes from the name of the sturdy fabric called serge, made in Nîmes, France, by the André family. Originally called Serge de Nîmes, the name was soon shortened to denim...

London's first boutique

From Gear Guide (Hip Pocket Guide to London's Swinging Fashion Scene) published in London in May 1967.


Bill 'Vince' Green was a stage portrait photographer who specialised in taking shots of body-builders. One of  his problems  was finding briefs that were brief enough and close fitting to show off the body beautiful to the best effect. There seemed to be no solution to his problem until Vince started making the briefs himself. He tried using stretch material intended for women's roll -ons and other unlikely cloths.  it was really only a part time activity for Vince, but his name spread -  people started turning up and asking for briefs to order in unusual materials. Even visiting royalty  sought him out and were fitted with swimwear.  In 1954 he visited Paris  and was struck by the clothes of the beat Left Bank student fraternity  and cafe society - young people who lived it up through the night in the cafes wearing dark glasses and a lot of denim.  

Denim took Vince Green's fancy. He discovered that  people  were actually bleaching their denims and sitting in baths to shrink them to body-hugging shapes. It seemed a great idea and Vince  decided to sell denim made like this. In October 1954 he opened up a boutique selling pre-shrunk pre-bleached clothes. At the beginning the trade was highly amused and though it a quickly passing gimmick. But soon he was supplying his denim wholesale to big stores like Harrods. Today over a decade later, this particular gear style is still very popular in many different forms. Is not surprising  and new as Vince probably thought. In the days of the great army of the Russian Czar's the officers were known to sit in  the hot baths to soak their sealskin trousers before a big parade or ball.

Bouncing boutiques.

Vince's  was probably the first boutique. It was quickly known to the new money earning young who where prepared to spend plenty of their earnings on looking good. Enough of them went to his place to ensure the success of his new venture.

But it was the next move the probably had the greatest effect on really getting the gear seen moving. An assistant to Vince – John Stephen – moved away and worked in a number of other small clothes shops specialising in new clothes in the Notting Hill and Baker Street district of London. These new little shops, bright, gay and intimate (unlike the traditional big clothes store or specialised shirt or men's shop) proved to be very successful. Stephen decided to set up on his own. He came back to Soho, the area where Vince had started, and opened a one room boutique on a second floor in Beak Street [after a disastrous fire at this shop his sympathetic landlord offered him a store round the corner in Carnaby Street, until then a row of dowdy shops,-- the rest is history…]

More info at A Dandy in Aspic (thanks for pic)

Dressing Vorticist (Violet Hunt)

Extract from The Flurried Years - Violet Hunt's account

of her life between 1908 and 1914.

A languid airless summer, rife with Law and Cubism, 

spent at Selsey with Princess Maleine as sole guest 

and play-secretary. Her husband flitted backwards

and forwards in his car, now recalling her, now 

giving her a new leave of absence. Joseph Leopold*,

playing golf,eating little contraband crabs, writing 

poems, and helping me with my novel, and taking 

a car into Chichester on Sundays to attend Mass 

in his own church, contrived to wile the summer 

away. He wrote Impressionist ; she painted 

Futurist; in dress, we two women went a step 

farther and dressed Vorticist, which was newer than 

Futurism, than Cubism, than Impressionism, old- 

fashioned almost by now, but which Joseph Leopold 

was still practising in his cunning vers libres.  

The very clothes we rejoiced to wear made us feel like 

it ; they coarsened us, I think. Non-representational 

art makes for hardness, enjoins the cynicism that likes 

to look upon the crudenesses, the necessaries of life 

merely — the red of beef, the blue of blouses, the shine 

of steel knives in a butcher's shop. Better, said Wynd- 

ham Lewis, than a dying stag or a virgin in Greek dress 

picking daisies. But this kind of art died in the war, 

being relegated chiefly to the camouflaging of ships. A 

faint echo of it is to be seen in modern jazz. 

My friend was very beautiful, with a queer, large, 

tortured mouth that said the wittiest things, eyes that 

tore your soul out of your body for pity and yet danced. 

She had no physique, as doctors would say ; no health, 

as women would say ; and — as no woman would ever 

admit except me — charm enough to damn a regiment. 

I used to call her the Leaning Tower, or Princess Maleine, 

that heroine of Maeterlinck who, with her maid, was 

prisoned in a tower for ten years and dug herself out 

with her nails. She ought not to have dressed in butcher 

blue with red blood spots on it. She was much more 

like one of those delicate, anaemic, mediaeval ladies whose 

portraits are traced on old tapestries, their small waists 

seeming to be set between the enormous wings of the 

hennin** and the heavy rolls of their trains that spread 

all round their feet. The modern blouse and skirt of 

Maleine, born out of her century, always appeared to 

be falling off her, her crown of heavy hair toppling, her 

deep brown eyes protesting against Fate and the absurd 

limitations of behaviour applied to supermen and under- 

women. She was no real suffragette, though she had 

collected with me and rattled a box at stations. Nothing 

but her eyes protested.

* Ford Madox Ford

**The hennin was a headdress in the shape of a cone or steeple, or truncated cone worn in the late Middle Ages by European women of the nobility.

The New Bohemianism

Another Jeremy Reed unpublished manuscript in his trademark purple ink. From 2007 when Doherty was much discussed in the media. 'Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?'

The New Bohemianism

 5:30 at Red Snapper Books, 22 Cecil Court, under moodily atmospheric London skies, and the red desk at which I write poetry is the lapidary colour of a dull ruby. When Peter Doherty surges in fedora or top hat angled on his intense fringe, a gun-grey Dior suit, white shirt and square cut Hardy Amies black tie, and a cheap Brick Lane pirate scarf then the reinvented bohemian look comes alive naturally, not as an image, but as the unmodified real thing. We face each other, poet and musician, as two anti-establishment artists, whose lifestyles and social viewpoints go radically wide of convention. When Aaron, the shop's owner comes up the stairs from his basement office, in a wide-brimmed black felt hat, a serpent brooch pinned to his striped blazer, with the offer to Pete, to jam in the basement over a bottle of Jack Daniels, we are three, joined by an inherent bohemian instinct. Pete gives me a Big Purple, turtle-shaped Quality street chocolate, explosive with praline, before taking the steps down to the shop's insulated basement. I carry on writing while the two go through an impromptu version of the Kinks' plaintive 'Tired of Waiting For You.'

An attack on the tie

From Walking Essays by A.H. Sedgwick. This book appeared in 1912 and is mainly about walking - with a good piece on walking in London. As well as attacking ties, Sedgwick also attacks the waltz and its ubiquity. The reference to the 'ridiculous' ties of 1892 is illustrated  by a picture of an 1890s dandy (Robert de Montesquiou). Oscar Wilde went in for a fairly fat tie but it is hard to find good pictures of his neck wear...

Ties furnish perhaps the clearest instance of the break-down of utilitarianism. They serve no material purpose of any kind. The days are long gone by when the tie added perceptibly to the warmth of the body : even the ties of 1892, which seem ridiculous to-day, cannot have saved a single valetudinarian of that age (as he thought) from a cold in the chest, or (as we now learn) have weakened his capacity to resist chill. No man's health or bodily comfort would now be affected in the slightest degree by the presence or absence of a tie. Nor, if utilitarians take the rash step of admitting beauty into the system of pleasures, can very much be said for ties. It is true that they sometimes add a desirable touch of colour ; but if beauty were our aim in ties, should we stop for a moment within the present limitations of either colour or shape ? A large flounced piece of drapery with an elaborate colour scheme, twisted in decorative lines across our chest to a bow on the hips or the small of the back, would be the very least we should put up with. Can any one with a little knot of monochrome peering bashfully from a minute triangular opening in a waste of drab monotony talk seriously about beauty in ties ?